YMMV / Haze

• Anticlimax Boss: The final shootout against Duvall. He's a totally normal enemy with a pistol that happens to kill you in two hits and a ridiculous number of hitpoints. Becomes something of a Puzzle Boss on the highest difficulty, in which he not only has even more health, but also kills you in 1 shot and has perfect aim. About the only way to beat him on Very Hard is to go into the fight with a rocket launcher and full ammo for it, or to use grenades to force him to dive to the ground for cover, then empty a mag into his head when he does so.
• Anvilicious: War is bad! No blood for Nectar! Interestingly, an interview shows that Ubisoft significantly toned down the anviliciousness. It was originally set in present-day Iraq. Elements of this still persist in the final story, where if the plot's not focusing on Nectar and the madness it brings, it's a thinly-veiled and rather aggressive allegory for the War on Terror.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Instead of being offended by the the game supposedly being a commentary on the War on Terror, think of it as a game where you get to play from the perspective of a Mook in a military organization that's a goofy parody of the Combine or the Helghast. The characters suddenly make much more sense.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • Shane discovers a container ship filled with the bodies of dead Mantel soldiers, all killed due to using Nectar. It's never so much as mentioned thereafter.
  • In the first mission, you find the pilot of a downed cargo plane, who asks if you can see him, then weakly tells you that he used to be a boxer before joining Mantel. Then he dies. While briefly talked about afterwards, this has no relevance to anything.
• Demonic Spiders: The Mantel gun turrets. Hard-to-hit targets with a lot of hitpoints and perfect aim.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Given its themes, this game could be seen as a precursor of sorts to Spec Ops: The Line.
  • Fans of Warhammer 40,000: Darktide may notice that Nectar gameplay while playing as a Mantel trooper is remarkably similar to the Veteran Sharpshooter class' Volley Fire ability at level 30; enemies are highlighted in yellow, killing them gives you a boost to ability duration encouraging you to chain together kills, and you have a buff to damage resistance while it's active. Thematically this even fits as Imperium soldiers are genocidal xenophobic fanatics juiced up on propaganda and violence, they just happen to live in a dystopian universe where this attitude is actually justified.
• Narm
  • There's absolutely no reason for your former comrades to reveal themselves with "BOOSH!" in the middle of trying to genocide rebels, but here we are. Not to mention Duvall losing his damn mind.
  Duvall: MEAT!
  • In the same scene as above, Marino is anti-climatically knocked out in the middle of exposition by Duvall just walking up and slapping him with the butt of his gun. It's so spontaneous it comes off as hilarious.
  • After you expose the core of the nectar administrator, everyone starts shrieking/screaming at the top of their lungs. It's hilarious.
  Soldier: BUST THIS DOOR DOWN!
  Soldier 2: SIR YES SIR! YES SIRRRRRRRRR!
  Soldier 3: LOCK AND LOAD MOTHERFUCKERS!
  • Right afterwards, Shane does a gentle tap to several keyboards, all of which explode for some reason.
  • Duvall's dying request ( "Please. Don't tell my mom.") utterly destroy the attempt at a dramatic demise, and only further paint the image that all of Mantel's soldiers are nothing but man-children. Can also work as Narm Charm, depending on how you see it.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • A major plot point is that Nectar hides the true horrors of war and makes bodies disappear. Unfortunately, the gore system for the "true horrors" is anaemic (not even putting impact marks on bodies, something GoldenEye managed) and the weak engine means bodies still vanish even when you're a Rebel, it just takes somewhat longer for them to do so.
  • A more specific failure occurs when a Mantel soldier commits suicide in front of Shane; he draws his pistol and blows his brains blood out, this happening before the pistol actually fires.
  • In the elevator, Duvall cuts off Merino's right index finger. Throughout the game, Merino is missing his left index finger.
  • There's another during the "Empty Hands" sequence; here, the player is supposed to see that Duvall has been slaughtering civilians on the basis that their "empty hands" are "just a grip away from holding a gun." Unfortunately, several of them are standard Rebel models, complete with bandoliers full of grenades.
  • When firing mounted machine guns, neither their actions cycle nor do their ammo belts move.
• So Bad, It's Good:
  • Much of the dialogue, especially between the Mantel soldiers.
  • The Mantel buggy's dialogue:
    • Follow the road, in a spiral!
    • Please eliminate terrorist threat.
    • Please return wheels to ground.
    • Geological instability detected...avoid mild peril.
    • In thirty yards, please take the jump.
    • Thank you for driving carefully.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: A common discussion point when talking about the game was that the core concept of battling enemies that are, essentially, FPS protagonists, was a really solid one. Switching sides should mean a complete overhaul in gameplay, where you go from hunting down pitifully weak rebels to struggling against power-armored goons with highly advanced weapons and Regenerating Health, pumped up further by combat drugs—possibly resulting in a change to a more stealth-survival strategy where a firefight with more than one Mantel trooper is probably going to mean a death. Heck, this game's premise is surprisingly close to that of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, showing that the story premise potentially has some legs. However, none of this happens in gameplay, and all that really changes between fighting outgunned South Americans with scavenged gear and highly-experienced PMC soldiers with sci-fi equipment is that the latter are easier to spot. Even your Promised Hand squadmates suddenly gain Regenerating Health whenever they're on your side. The game's highest difficulty level does turn you into a fragile rebel up against bullet-spongy super-soldiers that can shred you in half a second, but this mode is incredibly frustrating to play as you're not really given any special tools to compensate for the power disparity between your enemies and you.
• This Is Your Premise on Drugs: Haze is in many ways Halo and Call of Duty on drugs.

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